Half of the National Commission
on Terrorist Acts Upon The United States (i.e., the September 11 Commission)
greeted former Bush Cyberterrorism Czar Richard A. Clarke like fans
greeting a celebrity author. But, can we really trust the word of
the guy who gave us Y2K? Can we assume Clarke is any more believable
than...say...Chicken Little? When Clarke worked as Bill Clinton's
Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-Terrorism
his hallmark became the phrase that an electronic Pearl Harbor was
about to befall mankind. Clarke was convinced America was going to
face cyber-armageddon when the clock struck 12 on December 31, 1999.
In 1995, Clarke and others like him managed to sell the Clinton Administration
that bill of goods—and itt cost the taxpayers and consumers billions
of dollars as business and industry was forced to fix a problem that
never existed.

When Clarke was first noticed by
the media in 1986 he was a well-connected career bureaucrat with a
considerable amount of political sway on Capitol Hill. He used his
connections to wrangle the job of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
for Intelligence in the Reagan Administration at a time when terrorism
was just beginning to rear its ugly head in the world outside the
Persian Gulf area. Prior to his appointment, Clarke served in administrative
roles in the Pentagon and the State Department. Later, he served in
the Bush-41 Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military
Affairs. In that role, he became the coordinator of the information
database on the diplomatic efforts of Bush-41 to gain support from
America's allies during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Contrary to the sterling
image painted of him by the mainstream media today, Clarke never was
a first-string player in any administration. You might say 1999—the
year of the Y2K fears—was "the year of th the Clarke." For a very
brief period, Clarke became a second tier player with a first string
chorus—but only because it served the interests of the Clinton-Gore
Administration to promote Clark's fantasies about cyber-armageddon.
It helped Clinton and the liberals in Congress push through a legislative
agenda that likely could never have been enacted without the Y2K fantasy
fodder fed by Clarke. And Clarke enjoyed the limelight.

The total sum of Clarke's contribution
to the War on Terrorism during the Reagan years was a scheme he concocted
that Reagan actually contemplated. Clarke theorized that if the American
navy used jet fighters to produce sonic booms over Libya, accompanied
by empty rafts washing up onto the beaches around Tripoli, Gadafaffi
would believe that the United States had invaded his country. Clarke's
plan was leaked to the media, causing embarrassment to the Reagan
Administration. Clarke's invasion, needless to say, was abandoned.
It is unclear what political or military advantage Clarke perceived
the United States would gain, other than to perhaps scare Gadafaffi
for the a few minutes. I guess that was Clarke's idea of "counter-terrorism."

As Clarke leapfrogged into successive
presidential administrations he became fixated on cyberterrorism and
an unshakeable belief that cyberspace would be the battle ground of
the future—and that, to protect America, cybersspace had to be the
front effector of national security. As a high-ranking career bureaucrat
who could not be fired, Clarke was demoted to the role of Special
Assistant to the President for Global Affairs when he was passed,
like second-hand goods, from Bush-41 to Clinton. This placed him under
the thumb of Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth.
Where Wirth, like Vice President Al Gore, was narrowly focused on
what each thought was the threat of global warming, Clarke became
blindly focused on cyberspace, cyberterrorism and a growing doomsday
fear that a cyber-apocalypse was just around the corner when the computer
clocks turned to "2000."

Clarke's focus was cyber-centered
and, increasingly, his reports and his public remarks were pierced
with warnings of impending doom from either cyberterrorism or the
doomsday Y2K cyberclock. In 1995 Clarke convinced the Clinton management
team that there was a real threat to the critical infrastructure based
on existing cybertechnology that was available to anyone with malevolent
intent—not just foreign terrorists. Clarke envisioned scenarios in
which prankish hackers, domestic terrorists or common criminals as
well as foreign terrorists and nations intent on stealing America's
industrial secrets, would wage either economic or political warfare
on the United States through the Internet. Throughout the latter half
of the 9th decade, Y2K was woven into Clarke's cyber-nightmare until
the millennial bug became the bogeyman the world feared most.

After the Oklahoma City bombing,
Clarke got Clinton's ear—just as hee got Reagan's ear after the Achille
Lauro shipjacking in which wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was pushed
overboard into the Mediterranean. Clarke became Clinton's expert on
cyberterrorism and the threat of cyberterrorism became real in America.

As amateur hackers and cyber-pranksters
began creating complicated computer viruses designed to cripple the
hard drives of unsuspecting users for no reason other than to see
who could create the most destructive cyberworms, Clinton responded
with Executive Order 13010 on July 15, 1996. EO 13010 was followed
by PDD-63 to establish a system to assess the vulnerability of the
cyber and physical infrastructure of the federal government and to
protect the security of the national infrastructure from the growing
threat of cyberterrorism. These plans were followed by another executive
order in 1999 to fight cyberterrorism and still another one to protect
the information databases of America's corporations by January 1,
2000.

As Corporate America rushed to
prevent Y2K, Clarke realized that programmers hired by those corporations
to make their information databases Y2K compliant could easily slip
viruses into the systems, compounding the Y2K dilemma when the clocks
hit 12:00:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000. Clarke's warning—or rather,
his fears—appear not to ho have been based on evidence that third
world computer programmers were third columnists, but rather they
appear to stem solely from the fact that Clarke realized that a great
number of foreign computer programmers working in the United States
came from areas of the world generally viewed as hostile to the economic
and political objectives of the United States.

On Oct. 7, 1999, Clarke was quoted
in an AP wire service story as saying: "...[programmers] hired to
make a company's computer system Y2K compliant could easily slip a
little trojan horse or malicious code into the system instead." Clarke
insisted that it was possible that foreign programmers—under the cover
of Y2K—could actually be working to subvert the systems codes and
coollapse the delicately balanced critical infrastructure of the United
States. "It is at least theoretically possible," he said, "that a
nation could insert such [mechanisms], and then make demands of the
United States under threat to our infrastructure...It doesn't merely
have to be the use of a trapdoor to enter a system, seize control
and destroy the system...Any combination of malicious viruses, denial
of service, and trapdoor disruptions can create chaos." That same
week, the Los Angeles Times did a cyberterrorism story in which they
quoted Clarke. "An enemy," Clarke said, "could systematically disrupt
banking, transportation, utilities, finance, government functions
and defense...It's cheaper and easier than building a nuclear weapon."
But Clarke's premiere Chicken Little disclosures were made to Signal
Magazine in August, 1999. (Signal is published by the Armed Forces
Computer and Electronics Association.) It was for Signal that Clarke
coined the phrase "the electronic Pearl Harbor."

"You black out a city" he warned
in the article, "people die. Block out lots of cities, lots of people
die. [Cyberterrorism is] as bad as being attacked by bombs. Sadly,"
he concluded, "many of you are still in denial [about the threat of
a digital Pearl Harbor.]"

The lights didn't go out, and people
didn't die.

"Without computer-controlled networks,
there is no water coming out of your tap; there is no electricity
lighting your room; there is no food being transported to your grocery
store; there is no money coming out of your bank; there is no 911
system responding to emergencies; and there is no Army, Navy and Air
Force defending the country...All of these functions, and many more,
now can only happen if networks are secure and functional....Envision
all these things happening simultaneously—electricity going out in
several major citiies; telephones failing in some regions; 911 service
being down in several metropolitan areas."

On February 1, 2000 the New York
Times published a Clintonesque profile of Clarke. "He is trying to
raise the fear of terrorism in the United States to the right level—higher,
not too high—as he girds the nation on against the possibility of...what
he calls 'an electronic Pearl Harbor." The New York Times quoted Clarke—who
gladly reiterated his sober Signal warning for theem: "I'm talking
about people shutting down a city's electricity...shutting down 911
systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems.
You black out a city, people die. Black out a lot of cities, lots
of people die. It's as bad as being attacked by bombs...imagine a
few years from now: A president goes forth and orders troops to move.
The lights go out. The phones don't ring. The trains don't move. That's
what we mean by an electronic Pearl Harbor."

Chicken Little? You betcha.

Richard A. Clarke, the man who
wanted to be the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security very, very
badly, is a man who cried wolf one too many times—even before he was
called as an "expert witness" by the partisan Democrats on the September
11 Commission. When the Bush-43 Administration inherited him from
Clinton, he was the Y2K cybernut. But he was also supposed to be one
of many experienced counterterrorism "experts" that Bush inherited
from Clinton. He was also one of hundreds of carryovers from the Clinton
Administration that would likely have been weeded out and reassigned
to more harmless jobs if not for the threat from Osama bin Laden and
al Qaeda. Because of al Qaeda, Clarke remained the National Coordinator
for Security and Counter-Terrorism even though it didn't take the
Bush team long to realize that Clarke was a second string player trying
to compete on the A-team. Clarke was a perfunctory bureaucrat. But
even worse, he was a Clinton bureaucrat with an office in the Bush
Administration. Like many Reagan and Bush-41 executive branch employees
at the onset of the Clinton years, Clarke was relegated to the role
of a senior-level bureaucratic information collector in the mundane
process of governance. Once again, he became a faceless bureaucrat
in a world of faceless civil servants. He coordinated virtually nothing
and he advised virtually no one. He collected information and passed
it on to his supervisor, Dr. Condoleeza Rice to analyze and convey
to the President. Clarke's glory days were gone, but in his case,
he was still basking in his former Y2K glory when the media sought
his opinion..

Clarke sent memo after memo to
the President, to the Vice President and to National Security Director
Dr. Rice but his phone still didn't ring, and no one invited him to
attend the important meetings in the center ring. He was effectively
out of the loop. Clarke told the September 11 Committee that the Bush
people kept him so much out of the loop that he was not even told
that two of the September 11 hijackers—Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Hazmi
had enterred the United States. (Actually, nobody was. Since no one
knew that Almidhar and Hazmi were in the country to commit a terrorist
act, there were no red flags waving over their heads. Nevertheless,
the INS should have flagged them—annd the remaining 9-11 terrorists
as well—since most of them were in the couuntry on expired student
visas. They were not flagged by the INS because the visas were Saudi.
But, that's another story—and it is a visa problem that was not created
by this president even though it was a problem that was fixed by this
president by restructuring the INS under Homeland Security.)

Among the steady, never-ending
stream of apocalyptic cyberterrorism memos that Clarke sent to his
boss, Dr. Rice, was one he sent on September 4, 2001. That memo was
singled out by the Democrats as an apocalyptic warning that proves
Clarke was "on top" of the terrorist situation, and that his warnings
were ignored by the Bush Administration. All that exchange proved
was that the partisan Democrats on the September 11 Committee were
given a synopsis of Clarke's book, Against All Odds. The September
4 memo, they claim, proves that Bush's "top" counter-terrorism adviser
warned that hundreds of people could die by a strike from al Qaeda,
and that the Bush Administration did virtually nothing to combat the
threat. And, they reiterated—that warning came only sseven days before
the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The only problem was, that somber
warning was just one of a hundred identical memos Clarke sent not
only to his bosses in the Bush-43 Administration, but also in the
Clinton, Bush-41 and Reagan Administrations as well. Clarke was not
a man "on top of the situation." He was a man so consumed with the
situation that, eventually, his Nostradamus doomsday prophecies—or
aa facsimile of them—would necessarily have to come true. In point
of fact, Clarke''s memo was a vague rambling not unlike hundreds of
other vague, rambling memos that reached the desks of four presidents.
Change the names and locations and the messages were virtually the
same.

The biggest problem Clarke faces
in the court of public opinion is not that he lives in a fantasy world
where cyberterrorists are preparing to unleash cyber-armageddon on
an unsuspecting world—even though that is true. Clarke's biggest problem
is that his own words from speeches and public remarks refute the
allegations he has leveled against the Bush Administration. Clearly
Richard A. Clarke is a man on a mission. And his mission is twofold.
Clarke is determined to extract revenge against the man who denied
him the job as Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security and against
the woman, Condoleeza Rice, who demoted him from his role as National
Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism by naming him as Special
Advisor for Cyberspace Security on October 9, 2001.

But, that was the plum in the pie
as far as Clarke was concerned. His primary objective in addressing
the September 11 Commission was to sell books. Being the star witness
at the September 11 hearings—where half the ccommittee members and
two-thirds of the TV journalists flash your book cover—iis better
than doing a hundred radio and TV talk shows.

I wonder if Clarke's "Against All
Enemies" will outsell Michael Hyatt's "The Millennium Bug"—or the
thousands of other tomes and articles that thhat fed off Clarke's
fantasy by extolling the disaster that awaited mankind on January
1, 2000?

Jon Christian Ryter is the pseudonym of a former
newspaper reporter with the Parkersburg, WV Sentinel. He authored a syndicated
newspaper column, Answers From The Bible, from the mid-1970s until 1985.
Answers From The Bible was read weekly in many suburban markets in the United
States.

Today, Jon is an advertising executive with
the Washington Times. His website, www.jonchristianryter.com
has helped him establish a network of mid-to senior-level Washington insiders
who now provide him with a steady stream of material for use both in his
books and in the investigative reports that are found on his website.
E-Mail: baffauthor@aol.com

"Because of al Qaeda, Clarke
remained the National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism even
though it didn't take the Bush team long to realize that Clarke was a
second string player trying to compete on the A-team."